Chapter 1
My sister was dead.
It was impossible to count how long she’d been sick. You could say it was her whole life; you could say it was only a year. It didn’t much matter, did it? It didn’t matter how sick she was, now that she was just a rotting corpse inside a coffin, waiting to be put into the ground.
She had died a month prior to the funeral. There wasn’t a huge reception; my family had many friends, but my parents wanted this to be a private event. Only our extended relatives, and my godparents’ family, were invited.
I refused to wear black. Instead, I went to my sister’s closet and found one of her dresses that was undoubtedly too small for her. She’d gotten paint all over the front, splatters of all different colors. I couldn’t imagine her wearing it; I remember our great-aunt had bought it for her, and she’d said thanks, but it was simply too bright for her tastes. I think she meant to give it to me, but never got around to it, and ended up using it as an apron instead.
So I went to the funeral in this paint-splattered dress, wearing a red hat and neon blue sneakers. I stuck out like a sore thumb in the crowd, but no one called me out. Hardly anyone even looked at me, sitting there next to my parents, watching my mother cry and knowing I couldn’t do anything about it.
A part of my mind wandered to the future. All the money my parents had been saving for my sister’s college tuition would most likely shift over to mine; I would have no worries in that department. Undoubtedly, they would either shun me for reminding them of their loss, or cling to me for fear of losing me as well. That’s what parents in stories always did, anyway, and my parents were certainly closer to the second type.
I hated myself for wondering, but at the same time I understood it. I was only sixteen; I was allowed to wonder about the future, to forget the past and move forward. I understood that most had trouble moving on, and sure I would miss her, but my life wouldn’t grind to a halt because of it.
Sometimes I wondered about heaven. I never believed in God, and neither did my parents(or so I assumed), but I did believe that there was more to the world than what I could see. Maybe it’s because I was always lost in a land of stories, far away from the harsh reality of the waking world. Still, I asked myself time and time again, is there a life beyond death?
My answer came only after my sister had finally passed away: yes, there is, but not in the way you might think. My parents cried so much in the next few days after we found her dead, and a detached part of myself wondered why they were so concerned with someone who wasn’t there. It was then that I realized life beyond death is simple; people exist in memory. Someone cannot truly be dead until every single trace of them in the world has been erased, which is impossible.
So I came to understand that my sister was not dead; nor were any other people who had passed away since the dawn of time. Even if she wasn’t physically in my life anymore, she would remain in my memories for as long as I lived.
As they lowered the coffin into the hole, I lifted a handful of dirt from the ground. While everyone else threw their handfuls into the hole, I let mine fall down the front of my dress, staining the paint-covered fabric; a memento of this day, so that I might never forget.
It was a beautiful sunny day outside, which to most people would seem like the wrong sort of atmosphere for a funeral. I personally thought it was perfect. I tossed a piece of crumpled-up paper into the hole, then held out a magnifying glass. No one said a word as the paper caught, burning up in a matter of seconds and leaving only ashes. I dropped the magnifying glass in after it, then excused myself.
On the night my sister died, I was drawing in my room. The image on the page started as another doodle, but ended as a sketch of her, sitting in a wheelchair, smiling. I was about to start the lineart when I heard my mother scream, and abandoned the drawing to see what had happened.
When the ambulance arrived, I opted to stay home rather than follow them to the hospital. Once the house was empty, I returned to my room and finished the drawing, spending hours on intricate linework just to get every single detail.
When I was finished, it didn’t look like my sister at all, on the surface. She was distorted, twisted in on herself in pain, and yet her face was perfectly calm, smiling up at the camera despite the horror of her body. In her eyes, you could see despair. This was the spirit of my sister.
This was the drawing I burned in her grave.
When my parents came home, they told me she was dead, that she had killed herself. I told them I already knew.
On the night after the funeral, I dreamed of my sister, living in a world where she didn’t have to fight her body to be happy. The next morning, my mom reported that my aunt had seen my sister’s ghost at her house, petting her sleeping dog. I was never certain whether the rumours of ghost sightings and fortune telling in my mom’s side of the family were real, but after that day I had no doubts.
I am not afraid of Death anymore. To be honest, I don’t think I was ever scared of it to begin with. All I have to do is make sure I’m remembered, and I will live forever.
